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Obama Pledges $3 Billion to Map the Entire Human Brain

A new project to map the activity of the human brain could receive more
than $3 billion dollars in federal funds in President Obama’s upcoming
budget proposal.

A large-scale effort to understand the human brain and build a
comprehensive map of its activity is set to launch with the help of
billions of dollars in federal funds. According to the New York Times,
President Obama will outline the plan to fund the decade-long Brain
Activity Map project in his federal budget proposal, which the White
House is slated to release next month. Scientists involved in planning
the project hope that it will have the same catalytic effect on brain
research as the $3.8 billion Human Genome Project had on genetics, and
that it will spur the development of new therapies for various brain
diseases.

The White House Office for Science and Technology Policy did not
comment on the speculation, but several scientists and institutions,
including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), confirmed their
involvement in planning the project. Indeed, Obama may have been teasing
the new project during his recent State of the Union address, when he
cited brain research as the kind of science in which government should
invest. And NIH director Francis Collins may have accidently confirmed
as much immediately after the speech when he tweeted, “Obama mentions
#NIH Brain Activity Map in #SOTU.”

Harvard molecular biologist George Church, who is part of the planning team, told the Times
that the scientists behind the initiative hope to get federal backing
to the tune of more than $3 billion over ten years. Church also pointed
out that the initiative, if successful, could provide an economic boost,
echoing Obama’s message that every dollar invested into human genome
mapping returned $140 to the US economy.
The project will take advantage of emerging technologies that allow
scientists to simultaneously record the electrical activity of large
groups of individual neurons. In June last year, a group of researchers
that included Church proposed
pursuing several new approaches, such as the creation of molecule-size
machines to noninvasively measure and record the activity of brain
cells.Read More